Disney’s “Snow White” Remake Whistles But Doesn’t Work

Nothing good ever seems to come of Gal Gadot singing. Those of us with clear memories of March, 2020, during the early days of pandemic lockdown, may recall the video montage she beamed out of herself and other celebrities, all warbling John Lennon’s “Imagine.” It was meant to bring us together, and on that score it was a total success. Amid a crisis of mass illness, unemployment, poverty, and death, the internet users of the world—suddenly faced with an off-key medley of hope, performed by famous people sheltering in multimillion-dollar hideaways—found themselves united in pure, unmitigated hatred. Only a few days into quarantine, a loathsome instant classic of Hollywood vacuity had been born.

Now, five years later, Gadot is singing a new tune, and how. She doesn’t warble; she belts, or at least makes a valiant attempt. Her backdrop is not a mansion but a palace, where she descends a Vegas-ready grand staircase, with bewimpled ladies-in-waiting as backup dancers. And what she sings is not a song of hope but an anthem of fascist aggression: “All is fair when you wear the crown / A little perk that your power provides / If they dare speak up, swat them down / She, with the diamonds, decides.” Here it may be worth noting that Gadot delivers this performance in the new film “Snow White,” Disney’s live-action remake of its own 1937 animated masterwork, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” She plays the Evil Queen (“She. Was. Evil!” a narrator helpfully intones), which accounts for the severity of Gadot’s royal regalia: a black balaclava-style hood, a glittering cloak, and an enormous stained-glass crown so sharp and spiky that Her Majesty might have run headfirst through a cathedral window.

Gadot has worn ridiculous things before, notably and delightfully as Wonder Woman in various DC Comics movies, but then the role of Diana Prince was particularly well tailored to her charisma and behind-the-beat comic timing. In “Wonder Woman” (2017), as a demigoddess encountering the oddity of the human world for the first time, Gadot projected a pleasurable fish-out-of-water disorientation—a disarming mix of courage and naïveté. But, in “Snow White,” she must embody exactly the opposite, and the strain is immense. Tasked with reinterpreting one of the most frightening and emblematic villains in the Disney canon, Gadot evinces no feel for malevolent cunning, or even knowing cynicism; smacked down repeatedly by her Magic Mirror, she can barely conjure a decently icy glare in response. The great Jean Marsh, who gave us such blood-freezing villainy in “Return to Oz” (1985) and “Willow” (1988), makes Gadot’s Evil Queen look like the mushiest of poisoned apples.

Snow White herself does offer something of an antidote. She is played by Rachel Zegler, who, from the moment she appears, wearing scullery rags and a smile, reveals a winning calibration of radiant innocence and underdog conviction. Although Snow White has lost her parents and finds herself at her stepmother’s unreliable mercy, she hasn’t abandoned hope; she’s “waiting on a wish,” to quote the most tuneful of several new songs, written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. The Snow White of 1937, voiced by the opera singer Adriana Caselotti, leaned over a well and sang, “I’m wishing,” with sublime, lilting simplicity; Snow White 2025, by contrast, must dart hither and yon, across seemingly half the castle grounds, as she croons her way through a breath-sapping manifesto of self-empowerment.

And, against considerable odds, Zegler sells every word. She has the gift, rarer than it seems, of not only singing well but also acting well as she sings; her pipes are as potent, and her nerves as steely, as they were when she made her sterling film début, as Maria, in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” (2021). One day, Zegler may well tire of headlining faintly sacrilegious remakes of beloved movie musicals, and rightly so; based on her track record so far, though, I can register no complaint.

The internet, however, has registered plenty. When Zegler, who is of Colombian descent, was first cast in the film, racist trolls across the land registered their displeasure, much as they had done when Halle Bailey, a Black singer and actress, was cast as Ariel in “The Little Mermaid” (2023). In subsequent interviews, Zegler offered some mild criticism of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” pointing out its dated sexual politics, and noted that she would be playing a bolder, less lovelorn, more proactive fairy-tale heroine. Her remarks, mild as they were, generated fierce backlash. From there, the controversies snowballed. The less said the better about the vague rumors of a feud between Zegler, a vocal pro-Palestinian advocate, and Gadot, an Israeli actor who has been staunchly supportive of Israel, and whose own involvement with the film has fuelled calls for a boycott.

“Snow White,” in other words, may be the latest in a long, generally uninspired, and cumulatively numbing line of Disney remakes. But the sheer breadth of pre-release ill will it’s accumulated, across such a broad swath of the political spectrum, feels almost impressive. By the time the film finally arrived in theatres this week, it had sprouted almost as many controversies as dwarfs—and, of course, the issue of dwarfs predictably triggered one of the movie’s very first representational dustups. In 2022, the actor Peter Dinklage, who has a form of dwarfism, expressed his annoyance that Disney was “still making that fucking backward story about seven dwarfs living in a cave.”

Although Disney promised to approach that aspect of the story with greater sensitivity, purists can rest assured that the director Marc Webb and the screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson have seen fit to keep Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, and Dopey in the picture. They still toil merrily in a diamond mine, albeit one that’s been souped up to resemble a future high-speed Disneyland ride, and they still sing “Heigh-Ho,” though a version that has been tricked out with extended, over-explanatory lyrics. But the word “dwarfs” has been conspicuously banished from the movie’s title, and it is never once uttered in the film, which takes pains to emphasize that the seven men are nonhuman creatures. Indeed, there is a dispiriting absence of humanity in their bulbous and curmudgeonly computer-generated faces; the less human they look, the logic seems to go, the less offended any actual humans will be.

There are other, less perplexing differences. For one, the little men—for convenience, let’s call them the Seven—do not return to their woodland cottage, as they did in the 1937 film, to find that Snow White and various four-legged forest denizens have cleaned the place from top to bottom. This time, the Seven tidy up the house with Snow White, who calls the shots, delegates the tasks, and shrewdly chips away at the notion of household chores as purely women’s work. Fortunately, Snow White’s newfound enlightenment does not deny her the possibility of romance, although princes are now strictly off-limits; her love interest here is a fetchingly impudent bandit, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), who is leading a scrappy rebellion against the Evil Queen.

Snow White and Jonathan—honestly, it doesn’t sound promising. Who wants a fairy tale to end with “And Cinderella and Bob lived happily ever after”? Still, Zegler and Burnap do make a cute duo, even in cloying magic-hour interludes illuminated by highly swattable C.G.I. fireflies. From time to time, you are reminded of the fleet romantic-comedy touch that Webb brought, years earlier, to “(500) Days of Summer” (2009) and parts of “The Amazing Spider-Man” (2012). Mostly, though, you are arrested by the combativeness of the characters’ screwball banter, much of which is devoted to the explication of clashing political ideologies. How do you overthrow an Evil Queen—by trying to reason with her, or by pillaging the castle’s food stores and giving back to the subjects who are starving under her reign of terror? The film makes more than a token effort to explore the material and psychological realities of life under fascist rule, and the transformation of a charming agrarian utopia into an austere military dictatorship. In these moments, “Snow White” doesn’t feel entirely like a fairy tale; it’s like “I’m Still Here” with C.G.I. chipmunks.

Does that make Gadot’s Evil Queen the fairy-tale embodiment of Trump? Putin? (Netanyahu?) To even ask such questions is to imbue “Snow White” with an undeniable, even ostentatious, resonance. Seen from another angle, it bears out the calculation—as well as the mounting futility—of the interminable Disney remake project, which, from Day One, has exuded a cynical, self-cannibalizing reek. The cynicism derives from at least two interrelated forms of corporate cowardice. With a few rare exceptions—I’m thinking fondly of Tim Burton’s endearingly nutty 2019 remix of “Dumbo”—the remakes have smacked of a maddening artistic timidity, a reluctance to irritate fans by departing too boldly from classic material. That blandness has gone hand in hand with a shifty political opportunism, marked by half-hearted representational milestones—Ariel is Black! LeFou is gay (sort of)!—that Disney has either celebrated or downplayed, depending on which faction it’s trying to avoid offending at any given moment.

None of this could be further removed from the spirit, let alone the sheer overpowering visual beauty, of the original “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” A work of art made with wild risk and abundant imagination, the film looks like classicism now but was, in 1937, nothing short of revolutionary. One of the first full-length animated features ever made, it proved especially ingenious in its use of the multi-plane camera, with hand-drawn backdrops on shifting layers of glass, so that when Snow White fled into the darkness of a haunted forest, her terror—and ours—was amplified by an artful and astonishing illusion of depth. The new “Snow White” has its own illusions of depth, though not the kind that one can commend. ♦